"USA Today notes that the telcos are only providing phone numbers and transactional data to the NSA, and not personally identifying information on the callers themselves."
The phrase "transactional data" does not appear once in the USA Today story.
And for good reason. It is not involved.
"Customers' names, street addresses and other personal information are not being handed over as part of NSA's domestic program, the sources said."
It would be pretty hard to compile "transactional data" without any of that.
Again, this "author" is an uninformed crank.
Thanks for the good comments...pinged you to another piece.